Kanazawa Family Western-Style Residence

Twenty-nine Square Metres of Working Light

Kanazawa House Western Wing (金澤家住宅洋館, also written Kanazawa-ke Jūtaku Yōkan) is a single-storey timber structure at 2-2-7 Nishikata in Tokyo's Bunkyo Ward, built in 1930 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 11 December 1998. Its floor area is 29 square metres, the walls are finished in horizontal weatherboarding, and the roof is sheet metal.

Twenty-nine square metres is small. It is roughly the size of a generous studio apartment, and it sits beside a main house more than six times its footprint. Yet this is the building that explains what the architect Yōji Kanazawa (金澤庸治, 1900–1982) wanted from the property.

The clue is in the glazing. Along the north-west face, part of the wall and part of the roof are glass. Anyone who has spent time around studios recognises the arrangement immediately: north light, steady through the day, free of the shifting glare that direct sun brings, is what draughtsmen and painters build for. The Agency for Cultural Affairs states plainly that the construction reads at a glance as an atelier.

An Office and a Home in One Small Building

The Agency's record notes that the wing was intended as an architectural design office combined with a residence. That phrasing repays unpacking. Kanazawa had graduated in 1924 in the first architecture class the Tokyo Fine Arts School ever produced, the department having been reorganised out of the second design course only the year before. He then worked in the office of Shin'ichirō Okada, his teacher and one of the most accomplished architects of the period, and taught at his old school.

A man in that position in 1930 needed somewhere to draw. Not a room borrowed from a family house, but a place with the right light, a door of its own, and space to receive a client. The plan answers all three. Under the gabled roof lies the studio; the hipped section to the right holds a reception room. A visitor could arrive, be shown in, and never pass through the family's living quarters.

The building sits along the board fence rather than in the middle of the plot, which keeps it close to the street and to the gate. Small buildings of this kind rarely survive. They are the first thing demolished when a family needs a car park or another bedroom, and they seldom appear in architectural histories because nobody photographed them. That the register took this one in, under the criterion for buildings that serve as a model of design and with registration number 13-0046, has a good deal to do with how completely it preserves the shape of a working life.

Kanazawa's later work is easier to visit. The Rokkakudō of 1931, a hipped-roof shelter housing Denchū Hirakushi's statue of Tenshin Okakura, and the Masaki Memorial Hall of 1935, a reinforced concrete building in Japanese style with a shoin-style room on the upper floor, both stand on the Ueno campus of Tokyo University of the Arts.

Seeing It From the Lane

The wing is a private property and is not open to the public. No admission, no interior access, no set hours. What can be seen is the exterior from the road, and Bunkyo Ward's own explanation of the registration system notes that this street-facing exterior is what registration covers.

Look for the contrast in surfaces. Weatherboarding gives a low, horizontal grain across most of the walls; the glazed panels interrupt it with a flat plane that catches whatever light the sky is offering. On an overcast Tokyo afternoon the glass reads as pale grey and almost disappears. In late afternoon it lifts. The building looks different at ten in the morning and at four.

Note also the relationship between the three registered structures. Gate and fence define the boundary, the atelier runs along that boundary, and the main house sits behind with its ridge turned east and west. The composition was designed as one thing in 1930 and registered as three on the same day in 1998, which is simply how the register counts buildings.

Todaimae Station on the Tokyo Metro Namboku Line is about seven minutes on foot, Hakusan Station on the Toei Mita Line about twelve. Nishikata rewards a slow walk. Two blocks away at 2-9-12 stands the Hirano House, registered in September 1998, whose Western wing of 1922 is finished in white tile and half-timbering, and whose brick storehouse has glass laid over the window hoods. Set against Kanazawa's spare weatherboarded studio, it shows how differently two architects read the same word, yōkan, within a decade of each other.